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I know organising your worldbuilding is something many of you struggle with as I regularly receive emails such as this:

Hi Nathan,

I’ve only recently started Worldbuilding and currently I’m just toying with a few ideas, however I really struggle with organising all the ideas into one place to keep them coherent. Do you have any suggestions?

and this:

Hi! I just signed on for your Worldbuilding School. I’m fairly accomplished at the craft, but my issue is figuring out how to organize it all, make it all make sense together. I keep jotting down notes here and there, and that has worked in the past, but I am starting some very large projects and I want to be more “professional” about it. 🙂

For easy reference I’m calling this experiment Grid Worldbuilding. I’ll explain what it is and how the experiment will work later on in the article.

So here’s what I’ve been working on since the first part of this article was published.

I’ve decided that this world will have 6 main civilisations all competing for power.

The first picture is the rough location of each civilisation. This is a smart technique I learnt from cartographer Jonathan Roberts of Fantastic Maps fame.

What you want to do is draw a circle for each civilisation/political entity on your map. While drawing the circles make sure they touch/cross as these are places where there is the opportunity for conflict.

And conflict is essential to a great story.

Note: sketch your circles very lightly so you can rub them out later without leaving a mark.

Once you have the outlines of each civ the next step is to draw the coast line. Again do this very lightly at first.

You can also see in picture 2 that I’ve moved the bottom civilisation further down the map. This is because I wanted to create a bay, similar to the Mediterranean.

After creating the coastline I like to sketch the main features such as mountains, rivers and land sea. I’ve also marked the rough position of the temperate bands – subartic, temperate and subtropic. Doing this really helps when deciding what terrain should be located where.

Also, on this map I haven’t included the tectonic plates or prevailing wind but I’ve determined 2 things (these are decisions you make as the creator):

This is in the northern hemisphere so the wind currents work in an anti-clockwise direction. Which means warm air will be driven up on the right hand side of the map from the sub tropic land in the south.

I imagine a tectonic plate will cut through the middle of the bay and up to the top right where the mountain range has appeared. However I’ll need to go over my notes on tectonic plates and geography to see if this bay/mountain formation would occur naturally.

If it’s not a natural mountain range then it leaves a great question for the world history to answer.

Moving onto the grid

By now I’m happy with the rough layout of the map.

It’s an interesting shape and has the civilisations positioned perfectly for conflict with the potential for a mix of different cultures.

For example:

The north is warmer than the south so that instantly creates differences in people as they adapt to different climates.
Also some civilisations run north-south and others run east-west. This is an important factor in food production and civilisation development/strength if you’re a follower of the ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ philosophy.

Remind me to find my notes and write an article on that philosophy sometime. It’s a great answer to “why do some civilisations develop quicker than others?”.

But that’s another story – Onto the grid!

The goal now is to split your map up unto a grid. I’ve chosen 4×4 squares (though annoyingly I designed this paper with 34×34 squares not 32×32. So there is an overlap of 2 either side. ARGH!!).

Here is my grid. I’ve also labelled the X axis with letters and the Y axis with numbers. Perfect for creating an easy to read grid reference.

The Next Step

At this point we’ve achieved the first 2 goals in the Grid Worldbuilding Overview:

Draw a world map

Split it into a grid

Which means the next step is to:

Assign a page for each grid

Draw world details in the grid.

I might spend a little more time adding details, major cities and points of interest to the world map. Adding more details at this stage will make it easier when you come to draw the more detailed maps.

Which also brings me onto another thought.

Currently my grid is 9 sections by 9 sections. This makes a total of 64 sections.
That’s a lot of sections for what was supposed to be a quick experiment.

So I may increase each section to be 8×8 squares which would mean there would only be 16 sections in total. Not 64.

About Nathan 'Vancano' Smith

Nathan is the founder of The Worldbuilding School. It's his goal to make worldbuilding easier for the 1000's of people who build their own world - whether it's for fun or profit. He's also works as a content strategist and can help you build an audience for your stories.

About Nate Smith

Nate is the founder of the Worldbuilding School. It's his goal to make worldbuilding easier for the many people who build their own imaginary world - whether it's for fun or profit. As part of this goal he uses his skills in Cartography to draw maps. Read More…

Coming Soon!

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